The Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) was established by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow wireless service providers to send emergency alerts to their subscribers. Such alerts may be in the form of text messages, audio, and video alerts. The CMAS network will allow emergency service agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to accept and aggregate alerts from federal, state, and local emergency operations centers, and send the alerts over a secure interface to wireless providers. The wireless providers can then distribute the alerts to their subscribers.
While the FCC has proposed and adopted the network structure, technical requirements, and operating procedures for the CMAS, wireless service providers that participate in the CMAS must develop their own systems to receive alerts from FEMA and distribute them to their subscribers. Attributes of CMAS messages may be used by wireless service providers and user devices for various functions.
Commercial mobile alert message (CMAM) may be transmitted from an alert gateway to a commercial mobile service provider (CMSP) Gateway, and may be based on common alert protocol (CAP) key fields. Currently, CAP is not able to provide different messages to different persons within a common geographic region.